Blind Prophecy

Just in case you don’t remember me bitching about it way back in 2005, or have never spoken to someone on the patch, one of the most unusual side effects of wearing these things are the dreams.

Here’s wikipedia’s note on the topic:

Patches are intended to be worn for twenty-four hours at a time, and then be replaced at the same time every day. However, some individuals wearing the patch while they sleep experience abnormally vivid and possibly violent dreams or nightmares. Within this group, some people become acclimated and are not bothered; others find them completely intolerable. Other people actually enjoy the intense vivid dreaming, experiencing no nightmares or unpleasant dreams, just pleasant dreams of unusual intensity.

Basically, the brain isn’t used to a steady stream of nicotine throughout the night and the result, well, it’s sort of like upgrading from that 20″ television you bought in college to a 52″ plasma screen with surround sound and HDTV.

For example, over the weekend, I had an epic dream in which I got some random girl pregnant (luckily she didn’t have any kind of personality and let me make all the decisions about raising the child, so she got along well with my family). This dream had character development (though, not for my babymommy), themes and metaphors, subplots involving spicy food, action (rescuing the baby from crazed kidnappers), and more. I was so convinced in the moments after I woke up that it was three years later and I had to turn to the internet and it’s number one use (porn) to confirm that it was highly unlikely I’d “accidentally” knocked up “my girlfriend.”

Last night moved away from the epic multi-generation genre and my brain decided it would be a lot more entertaining to force me to confront all my personal insecurities in an artsy experimental style. I dreamed about me, telling another me to stop being so hard on ourself. Although, note to subconscious: if you’re going to force me to look at myself naked and see how good looking I am, you might want to make me sorta good-looking in the dream. I’m just saying that hyper-realistic focus on details I don’t notice in waking life (i.e. the small bruise on my hip from bumping into something at the gym – I’m only even aware of it because I noticed it during my shower and didn’t give it another thought) is counter-productive to the self-esteem pep talk.

I have a theory that the closer the patch is to my head, the more intense the dreams. If I place it on my upper back or near my shoulders – the dreams are insane. If I smack that baby on my ass or near my waist, not so much. Maybe I’ll have to experiment over the next few days.

Filed under: livejournal by Jere Keys